The great achievement of Western culture since the Enlightenment is to make many of us peer over the wall and grant some respect to people outside it; the great failure of Western Culture is to deny that walls are inevitable… — James Q. Wilson Copy Share Image
The view that we know less than we thought we knew about how to change the human condition came, in time, to be called neoconservatism. Many ... , myself included, disliked the term because we did not think we were… — James Q. Wilson Copy Share Image
What most needs explanation is not why some people are criminals, but why most people are not. — James Q. Wilson Copy Share Image
I believe we ought to subsidize some health care for the poor, but Medicare subsidizes everyone's health care — James Q. Wilson Copy Share Image
Character is not the enemy of self-expression and personal freedom, it is their necessary precondition. — James Q. Wilson Copy Share Image
I believe that the high rates of property crime (and some of the increase in violent crime) are part of the price you pay… — James Q. Wilson Copy Share Image
I will have an administrative system where there is no way to extricate red tape. — James Q. Wilson Copy Share Image
In terms of other functions, we are making a mistake about insisting on a public school monopoly. — James Q. Wilson Copy Share Image
Community-based policing has now come to mean everything. It's a slogan. It has come to mean so many different things that people who endorse… — James Q. Wilson Copy Share Image
Public order is a fragile thing, and if you don't fix the first broken window, soon all the windows will be broken. — James Q. Wilson Copy Share Image
